Hi Dhanaraj, I would try to export them to data files. Let's say HTML,
ODT, etc. Then I would run software for content/text analysis (also
called computer assisted qualitative data analysis software).
Here you can find a lot of possibilities:
http://courses.washington.edu/socw580/contentsoftware.shtml
Here you have a review:
http://people.iq.harvard.edu/~wlowe/Publications/rev.pdf
Resources related to content analysis and text analysis
http://www.content-analysis.de/software/qualitative-analysis
I am sure there are others you can find using a search engine. Let us
know which one worked for you,
Michael Lee.
michael at nexodigital.net
MSc Candidate
School of Communication
University of Costa Rica
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 19:16 -0400, Dhanaraj Thakur wrote:
> hey all,
>> part of the research I am doing requires that I identify threads on a
> listserv for analysis. Threads consist of emails that are a series of
> responses to an initial email.
>> of course the easiest way to do this is to sort emails by subject
> line. however as you might know this is not complete as, for example,
> some participants will change the subject for a variety of reasons
> while still remaining in the same thread. Thus one could analyze info
> in the email header to identify threads, but in my case this data is
> not always available. Alternatively, one could manually scan though
> the text of the emails - which is very time consuming when using a
> large email corpus.
>> Therefore, what I need is a method (preferably automated) that can
> identify email threads by looking at the texts of the emails. I can
> imagine some software that does this and can create clusters of
> emails based on semantic similarities that I could equate to threads
> - but I haven't been able to identify any just yet...
>> the units of analysis that I have described are fairly common and, I
> imagine, so is my problem. Thus perhaps people on this list can point
> me to existing methods/software/papers that have already addressed this issue?
>> thanks
> Dhanaraj
>>>>> Dhanaraj Thakur
> Ph.D. Candidate
> School of Public Policy
> Georgia Institute of Technology
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